Abstract

This chapter will scrutinize how gender constructs available in the
fiction, journalism, and scholarship of the late twentieth century
complicate any discussion of nationhood, modernity, and development
because these narrate ‘women’ as an unstable signifier
destabilizing established meanings. In the fiction of the period,
authors explore constructions of femininity through a variety of
female characters that modify or subvert the roles they are required
to play. Often readers are critically distanced from these
characters by the movement of the text or by ironic third-person
commentary. Such distancing signals the possibility of reading
differently the apparently seamless narrative of the nation.